


The Daughters of Quentin Lance

by kennagirl



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-16 05:42:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15430218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kennagirl/pseuds/kennagirl
Summary: Mayor Quentin Lance, beloved father and friend, passed away Thursday at Starling General Hospital. Before taking office, he served the city as Captain of the police department. He is survived by his daughters.





	The Daughters of Quentin Lance

_Sara_

It happens again.

All the time in the world, captain of her own time machine, and she's too late. She'd learned, she knows better, and she isn't about to do something stupid. Time is meant to happen. She isn't going to go off half-cocked and try to save her dad, no matter how much she wants to. If she does that, it will just be a snowball effect of worse and worse consequences. But why couldn't she land a day earlier, an hour, fifteen minutes, just long enough to actually say good-bye this time?

Would it be too much to ask that little?

In some bizarre twist, her not-dead not-sister is there with them when everything falls apart. She can almost believe that Laurel came back just long enough to escort Dad to the other side. The problem is there's nothing like what Sara normally sees when Laurel looks at her. No affection, no annoyance, no concern, not even irrational anger that she wasn't there to help. There's only sadness for herself and wariness towards Sara. Sara wants to be pissed, to ask what right this woman has to wear her sister's face and grieve her father, but she can't. She needs all the family she can get, even family that isn't family, that says she's nothing like her family, that was trying to kill her family of friends up until recently.

Sara is not her father and she's not Laurel. She's not going to lose herself in the bottom of a bottle. But she does have that same addictive personality. So she's going to mourn her dad, say a good-bye that he can't hear, and then she's going to get back on the Waverider.

There's work to be done.

She'll lose herself in that.

 

_Felicity_

Felicity needs to call her mom. She knows this. It's why her phone is on the table in front of her. William has gone to bed, exhausted from everything that happened that day, all the emotional upheaval. She gets it, she's tired too, and she doesn't have the same adolescent hormone fluctuations making everything that much worse. She hasn't lost her second parent in a year, one that she had just come to accept as a parent.

Except she kind of has.

As weirded out by it as she had been, she knew Quentin was a good match for her mom. She will never admit it, but she cried the night she found out they had broken up. In the six years she knew him, before he started dating Donna, before he even became part of Team Arrow, he cared for her. He showed more care in six years than her father had in her entire life, regardless of the amends he tried to make. He was a good man, a fantastic dad to Sara and Laurel, and she had begun to think-

She needs to call her mom.

Donna will probably get the next flight out. She'll want to be there for the funeral, for Felicity as she settles into being a surprise single stepmom, for William when Felicity just can't take it anymore. She'll probably even take the former Mrs. Lance out for drinks since no one else thinks of the position serious exes are in at a funeral. Felicity certainly can't because she has too much to do, between helping Sara plan the funeral and worrying about William and Oliver and crying at night when she's sure William is passed out and won't hear her, grieving the closest thing to a real father she'd had.

Tragic deaths are just a part of her life at this point. She doesn't think she'll ever get used to it.

She picks up the phone and calls her mom.

 

_Thea_

She had a dad. Technically she had three dads. One who raised her and loved her until she was twelve years old, spoiling her rotten despite knowing that she wasn't biologically his. One who put her family back together and probably kept her from spiraling out of control worse than she did, who deserved better than he got at the hands of the Queens. And one who manipulated her and used her as a pawn in his chess game of ambition, but also trained her and helped her find strength she didn't know she had, which she used to walk away from him.

Quentin was not her dad, but Laurel had been as good as a sister to her, and more than once the three of them had cramped around a kitchen table with late night Chinese take-out, especially during the summer Ollie and Felicity had gone away. He was dad-like, asking about their days, wanting to know about their actual jobs as much as the vigilante work.

They got closer after Laurel died, after they both started working in the mayor's office to help Ollie keep the city afloat. Thea had to help keep him afloat, despite his best attempts to drown himself in a bottle. He was family, and family doesn't let family suffer alone. She said everything she could to get him to stop, to cut back at least, and when that didn't work, she drove him to rehab. She took care of him when he couldn't take care of himself, because she knew he would do the same for her. It wasn't the most traditional of relationships, but then, what does she know of normal family relationships?

She's sleeping halfway around the world when Digg calls her cell phone. She holds it together long enough to promise she'll be there, and when she hangs up, she curls into Roy's chest and cries.

Apparently she had four dads.

 

_Dinah_

There have been plenty of ups and downs in her relationship with Team Arrow, more downs recently. But she can't imagine being anywhere else in this moment.

Quentin is strong. He's lost both of his daughters and come out the other side, despite his tendency to drink too much. Dinah can't fault him for that, as her own preferred coping mechanism of single-minded revenge isn't healthy either. He's gone toe-to-toe with some of the worst Star City has seen. He shot a woman wearing his daughter's face to save her life.

Quentin Lance is a strong man, but he is not a young man. He has a gunshot wound to the gut that did not receive immediate medical attention. She wishes she could be surprised when the doctor appears in the middle of Oliver's arrest to announce that he didn't make it, but all she feels is resignation.

Oliver and Quentin are both gone. Their team has lost two of its main tethers. She has no doubt that Digg will step up to hold them together, but she knows it won't be the same again. She feels lost as she stands in the waiting room.

She doesn't belong with Sara and Felicity, clinging to each other and crying quietly. She's not about to approach Siren, despite her looking as lost as Dinah feels. She spots Rene down the hall, forehead and fist pressed to the wall like he's deciding if breaking the drywall is worth breaking his knuckles. She did not have the same relationship with Quentin that any of these people had, did not spend the same amount or quality of time with him, but she still feels the loss of him like a punch to the gut.

Oliver may have given her a purpose, but Quentin had given her a name, his family's name. That counts for something.

 

_Black Siren_

It's all his fault.

Diaz had been aiming at her and he jumped in front of the bullet. He did this to himself.

More than that, she never asked him to get involved. In fact, she told him not to. She told him she could handle it, and if she couldn't, then she wouldn't. Diaz would kill her in the end and there are plenty of worse things to endure than death.

She hadn't even wanted him in her life. She tried to get rid of him, to remind him over and over that she isn't his Laurel. She's her own person, and she goes by a different name, one that she gave herself. She thought he got the memo around the time he shot her and left her for dead, but apparently not. Instead, it put his guilt into overdrive and he was determined to save her.

She knew that he used to look at her and see his second chance at making things right in the world. She hated him for that, but recently, she's pretty sure he wasn't seeing his perfect, long-gone Laurel anymore. He saw her. She's no longer a replacement daughter but an additional one. One he never asked for but still worried over the same as his daughters from his world. And she enjoyed that, encouraged it, not just as part of a scheme, but because it's been so long since she's been cared for and loved as a person, not a pawn or a piece of ass.

She let him love her like a daughter, and he did. All the way up to giving his life for hers.

It's all her fault.

 

_& Laurel_

She's been awaiting and dreading this day since she arrived here. She knew it was coming sooner or later, probably sooner with the lives they lead, but that doesn't mean she's happy about it. Except, she is, selfishly happy that she's going to see family again. Tommy's kept her company since she got here, wherever here is, and she's enjoying the time spent getting reacquainted, but she misses everyone else too.

Not enough to wish they'd join her, but she misses them all the same.

She's also sad, mostly for Sara and the others left behind. She's mad too, at Diaz, at her evil twin, even at her dad for getting himself into this situation. She's a mess of contradictory emotions, none of which stop her from watching from above as her dad lies in a hospital bed, as he talks to the vigilante family they made for themselves, as he codes and the doctors try to save him. Laurel mutters to herself, telling them to stop it, to fix him, to let him walk out of that hospital and live to fight another day. She ignores that small, selfish part of herself that misses him.

In the end, it's too late, too much, and she watches as the doctors call a time of death, shutting off the machines that had been keeping him alive at the end. She waits, counting the moments, until a patch of air or whatever it is here shimmers in front of her. He falls out of the shimmer, catching himself on hands and knees, then clutching at his chest in surprise, a habit that no longer bears reason. He looks up, and his jaw drops when he sees her standing there, smiling and whole.

"Hi, Daddy."


End file.
